Changemaker Challenge Welcomes This Year’s Honored Guest

Drumroll, please! Tonight’s the night for the 2024 Changemaker Challenge!

The idea behind the Changemaker Challenge is simple. The United Way teams up with local philanthropic institutions in different regions to hold competitions to highlight and award social innovation ideas. In our case it’s the United Way of Central Maryland and the local partners are The Horizon Foundation, Women’s Giving Circle, and Community Foundation of Howard County.

What are social innovation ideas? I like this simple definition from the University of San Diego’s Kroc School:

The essence of social innovation is to create social change through new processes, products, services, or programs. - - What is Social Innovation?

Who are changemakers?

They’re the folks who are coming up with new ways to solve existing problems with ideas that help people. 

I feel like this combination of changemakers and social innovation has a lot of overlap with ideas in a recent post I wrote about current trends in philanthropy, notably:

I am convinced that this way of engaging is making a big impact in the community by making deeper and more lasting impressions. - - Generosity: It’s Spreading, Village Green/Town² 

Here are the finalists you’ll see tonight:

• Brightminds 
• Community Ecology Institute 
• Emmanuel Simms 
• HoCo Pride 
• Irie Cooking by Michelle 
• JustLiving Advocacy, Inc. 
• Luminus Network for New Americans 
• NonFudgery 
• Sacral Roots  
• Sobar, Inc.
• Women's Art Therapy Support Group

Tonight’s program gives them an opportunity to make their pitch, not just for the grant monies that will be awarded, but to a far more important audience: you.

Yes, you. You are the honored guest. You are their neighbor. This is their community. Big ideas are absolutely powerless sitting in a drawer or languishing on a page if nobody knows about them. That was my biggest takeaway from 2021’s Changemaker Challenge: you may begin the evening knowing about only one or two of the finalists. By the end you will have been exposed to a veritable garden of new ideas. 

One or more of them may really click with you. You may decide to get involved. What’s more, you will be able to tell other people about them in conversations you have in the community and online. If the Changemaker Challenge can get you excited about new ideas of social innovation, then you become an organic matchmaker, if you will, between those ideas and the people around you. 

I watched the last one in 2021. As I wrote back then, 

You can see them make their pitches tonight from 6-7:30. But that’s not all. Viewers will have a chance to vote on their favorite idea and the audience choice winner will receive $10,000 to help jumpstart their changemaking idea. We may have become blasé about commercially packaged television shows that encourage viewers to text in their favorites. But this event, while using a similar concept, is effectively giving participants the opportunity to fund a project that will help their own community. 

While Columbia may be the best place to live in Maryland, we still don’t have our own television station. So you’ll need to watch this on Zoom. Here is the link you need to register for the Changemaker Challenge:

Howard County 2024 - Changemaker Challenge 

This is a live program but, if it is like the one in 2021, finalists will have prepared a brief pitch video which illustrates their initiative. (True confession: I loved the videos.) There are quite a few finalists this time around and my plan is to order a pizza and make a “car bingo”* sheet to keep track of the different participants.

Something that would make me happy would be if this years’ event drew more than people who are ‘in the know’ already. I guess that’s my pitch to you. Even if you can’t commit to watching the entire thing, at least take a peek. Set a timer for fifteen minutes if you need to. 

You will learn something about your community that you did not know, and you will meet people working creatively to make things better. And that’s a win as far as I am concerned.

Village Green/Town² Comments

*Other people use spreadsheets. I make car bingo cards. They work for me.